Paul Graham's exhibition, entitled Paintings, is a show of photographs. They are not even photographs of paintings - although a cursory glance might mislead the viewer - but close-up photographs of graffiti on lavatory walls. All male readers will be familiar with the desperately drawn bodies and genitalia, the confessions, fantasies, appointment times and implorings. I can't speak of female loos, but informants tell me that graffiti in female loos is of another genre entirely.
Seen from a distance (something one cannot do within the confines of the toilet cubicle), cropped and beautifully mounted, some of Graham's colour photographs look like photographic reproductions of abstract paintings. With their immaculate sheen and presentation, they could almost be taken for works by Cy Twombly, or the earlier abstract impressionist paintings of Philip Guston, as inadvertant Rothkos.
But these are smear artists, golden shower Pollocks, morbid muralists and cottage conceptualists of the smallest room. It is, ostensibly, an exhibition about painting, and in particular the work of the abstract expressionists and their allies. The catalogue even opens with a letter of intent, sent to the New York Times in 1943, signed by Barnett Newman, Adolf Gottlieb and Mark Rothko, outlining the aims of the nascent movement: "Our work must be an insult to anyone who is spiritually attuned to interior decoration".
That these unknown bathroom Basquiats and tinkletown Twomblys occasionally show glimmers of humour, of wayward artistic talent, or a misguided literary bent, is unsurprising. You shouldn't be surprised to find cabinet ministers, playwrights or even art critics amongst the denizens of these gloomy confessionals. Remember Joe Orton's diary records of toilet bacchanals, or MP Tom Driberg's brushes with the law in loos near Parliament Square.
Graham has turned himself into a bloke with a camera and a good if unlikely alibi. Explaining himself away might raise a few vice squad eyebrows, but this kind of "research" is meat and drink to the sophisticates of the art world who, like the cops, have seen it all. For those who prefer the reek of industrial strength disinfectant to the smell of turpentine and paint, these images undoubtedly have a certain piquancy and frisson all their own. There are, doubtless, connoisseurs of these grim walls just as there are of art. I read these traces on lavatory walls as murmurs of loneliness, as much as semi-public accounts and illustrations of extreme fantasies and acts. The trouble with toilet graffiti is that one can't help reading it, looking at it, wondering at it, on those occasions when a visit to the gents is unavoidable.
Likening toilet graffiti to the heroics and sensitivities of a certain way of painting is to play on the meaning of the word "expression", and what it came to mean in art in the late modernist period. More critically, what Graham's Paintings do is to raise the question of intention, and the difference between looking at something, and reading its internal meanings and codes.
It is a question, then, about surface and content, and about taste and abhorrence. What these works conspicuously do not do, is say anything about the authors of these texts, the fantasists, exhibitionists and cottagers themselves, and they messages they send.
Until October 28. Details: 0207 491 0621.
